Wellfleet Public Library

Alex S. Vitale has been studying and writing about policing and public safety for the last 30 years. In 2020, his book The End of Policing became a best-selling guide to the arguments in favor of "defunding the police." Since then, he has worked with community based organizations, civil rights groups, and governments to develop a wide range of evidence based practices to make communities safer, such as civilian crisis response teams, replacing school police with counselors, services and restorative justice practices, and investing in community based anti-violence practices. Over the last year he has been working in Newark, NJ, which has one of the most fully developed anti-violence efforts in the US. In 2014, Mayor Ras Baraka created the Newark Community Street Team and began funding a range of other community organizations to develop a coordinated set of strategies for reducing violence. In 2020, he diverted funding from the police department to create The Office of Violence Prevention and Trauma Recovery. Today, violent crime in Newark is at a 60 year low. Vitale, a professor of Sociology at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center, will lay out the details of the new approach being taken in Newark and the implications for the future of public safety.